I liked how much I was able to get done with the 7 day rogue-like challenge and thought about doing something similar on a recurring basis. As a rule of thumb I like to program at least a few hours a week, so as not to loose any skill. If anything to become better. I do not have a whole lot of time to program, there are many other things competing for my attention and so inspired my idea.

A 12 hour game jam, though not just for games so, just a 12 hour jam. It would happen every weekend, the opening would be 12 am Saturday GMT and closing would be Sunday 11:59:59 pm GMT. Participants would be limited to 12 hours of programming within the 48 hour window. The idea is to be based off of agile programming where the developer would release a stable (reasonably stable) version of their game or application every week. Creating a very nice in depth piece of software over a period of a few weeks to a few years.

The weekdays would be "pen and paper" only. Where the developer comes up with ways to implement their next big idea into the game. There is no limit to the number of weeks a project could last, just to try and create the next release during some combination of time equivalent to 12 hours maximum during the weekend.

One day I would hope to have a website with ads and donations where the money would be divided amongst the developers according to the number of downloads that developer has. Also each developer would have a personal donation box so an individual could donate specifically. But I have yet to learn web design.

Until then I will be trying out my idea to see if it works out to be fun and rewarding.

Here is the link to Agile Session:
http://agilesession.blogspot.com/

Well I actually finished 7drl 2014 last Friday, 14 March with marginal success. I am new to blogging and any form of online challenges. Hell, I don't even play multi-player online games. But I decided to look at my blog and noticed that people actually visit it. I feel I didn't do my part in updating the community about by progress and that my one post isn't much to look at.

The game fell far short of where I wanted it. After 5 days of using BearLib Terminal I decided to create my own tiling structure with SDL. It seemed that BearLib Terminal didn't perform correctly if I opened my application via the console (which is what I would do when I wanted to debug it). I also had a programming error which after 3 days of not figuring out, I blamed on BearLib Terminal. It was not the case that BearLib caused my errors. I eventually fixed the problem although it was one of those, "I changed some things that had to do with another problem and it ended up fixing the bigger problem." So I have no idea what fixed it.

My experience with rouge-likes doesn't extend very far, about 25 minutes of Nethack. But it's easy enough to conceptualize a game that is procedurally generated, turn based, and perma-death. I would have liked to have it compiled for multiple operating systems so that anyone could run it. Maybe even a web application, I have seen a lot of those and they are very easy play.

My game begins with the player spawned in a random location, in a large finite map, with his villager buddies. They don't really do anything except cause frustration while the player tries to capture them and build a fort around them to keep them safe from zombies. Day cycles to night and the zombies begin to spawn, but don't worry with your small band of villagers there most likely will not be any zombies coming after you. The player builds and builds until one day a zombie just happens to be walking by the fort and locks on to a villager. The villager is not afraid he just goes about his business of random movements here and there. Eventually the zombie forces his way through the wall breaking it and enters the fort to "turn" the villager. But the player is there to fight the zombie off. It was a close call, but the game is getting harder. There needs to be more walls.

I wanted to have more resources that could be found by exploring caves below. the deeper the cave the better the resources. The better the resources the better the walls and doors. I would have liked to have more intelligent villager spawning to reduce the chance of having a villager spawn outside the fortress, as well as the obvious fix of the villager spawning on a fortress wall there by replacing it. I didn't have much time to test as I went along. I am also very disappointed in my fight mechanics between the zombie and the player. There is no way to attack a zombie without being attacked yourself. No health regeneration either.

After letting a friend play it and watching the game crash several times for ridiculous reasons I decided to do a little update. Preventing the placement of blocks outside the world (crash) and adding health regeneration to give the player a fighting chance. Technically I called the game finished and made the changes after. But in all fairness due to a camping trip I was limited to a six and a half day rogue like. So I took 1/2 an hour to fix a bug, it's still a 7 day rouge-like to me.

So download the game and try it. The source is included and I could sure use some constructive criticism as to a better way to do something or what could have been added/omitted. I plan on compiling on my friends machines so that I can include a windows and mac version as well.

Download: LINUX
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4ipv1daauefu30a/4OHbhouT7d

Download: SOURCE
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/oebugj2g17lpnbq/4kH_fgpDg-

Started 7 day rogue like challenge 2 days ago. I changed my mind about how my game having an ending. Instead of what is stated in my game registration in 7DRL I am going to create a highest score game. The objective is for the player to collect resources to build a fortress to protect their villagers from zombies. I plan to add a little bit of Minecraft in the sense that as the player adds more doors to the fortress their current villagers will begin to spawn new villagers. The more villagers the player has the more zombies that will come. The goal is to create a fortress for as many villagers as possible before it is over-run and the player looses the game. It might be worth mentioning that the zombies will be able to stack against the walls and apply more and more pressure until the wall collapses. I hope to have caves to explore in 10 levels under ground. The deeper the player goes, the better the resources, but the more dangerous it gets. I still have a lot of details to work out, just making it up as I go along.

I haven't been able to do as much as I would hope. I get about 3 hours a day if I'm lucky to code. I may have bit off more than I can chew here.

Day 1 I spent most of my time learning this BearLibTerminal library. But I managed to get an over-world with some trees to generate randomly on it and some player movement and collision detection.

Day 2 I spent most of my time fixing my code as I learned more about BearLibTerminal and decided to restructure my code differently. I am in the same place as Day 1 but with better organization and a better look to the game.

I hope to get the villagers, zombies and a menu, plus the ability to continue or start a new game finished tomorrow.